Film Differences: Kodachrome vs. Ektachrome vs. Fujichrome

I have been meaning to post on this for a while. Stephen Fletcher, who is working on digitizing the photograph and film collection of the photographer Hugh Morton at UNC library had an interesting blog post on some experiments that Morton did shooting different films, including Kodachrome, Ektachrome and Fujichrome. The differences between the film types are obvious to even a casual observer.

We often find that people scanning Kodachrome slides are unhappy with the cool cast of many of these slides, and with some of the more muted (if not more realistic) colors. We can warm these slides and boost saturation easily enough, but is it still Kodachrome? Have we violated the integrity of the images? Some in the archival sciences would say that doing so is a major harm here. However, for most of our customers, we aren’t doing work that is truly “archival” in the academic sense. Rather, we are preserving the memories in the slides. With this in mind, removing color casts and pulling details out of shadows is in line with our mission. What do you think?

A View to Hugh, the blog that goes along with the digitization effort at UNC is an interesting read, well worth a visit. Thanks to Stephen and his colleague Elizabeth Hull for the informative writing.